MEDIAtion: Flexible literacy terms, communication and “viral” learning in 9-12 classrooms

Abstract

Jones, Clarke, and Enriquez (2010) claim that “literacy flexibility” is “vital for an increasingly digital and globalized society, but it is largely neglected in school literacy curricula” (p. 95). To engender such flexibility Milner and Milner (2012) suggest “that the first step toward helping students navigate digital texts effectively is for the teacher to analyze [personal] strategies for [media] comprehension” (p. 214). The flexibility inherent to becoming media literate teachers and students is the basis for the MEDIAtion project. It focused on pre-service teacher candidates from York University in Toronto, Ontario who are placed in classrooms throughout Canada’s largest school board, the Toronto District School Board. An interdisciplinary group of teacher candidates developed seven innovative and cross-curricular terms to act as a common vocabulary that would specifically name educational strategies around media literacy. They then used this common vocabulary to gauge levels of response (or non-response) from their mentor teachers, school administration and students in their school-based practicum placements, asking if and how a school-wide instruction of digital and media literacy skills could be more explicitly implemented with a common cross-curricular vocabulary.